Ask HN: How do you get your employees to care? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you get your employees to care?

16 pointsdiminium11 comments

I know this site is for more web entrepreneurs but for service/retail industries where the customer must spend time with your employees - how do you get your employees to care about the company just as much as you do?

I've been doing a lot of Christmas shopping lately and had to do some returns and stuff noticed something, the employees don't seem to care.

Except for a very small list of companies, what I find is most employees who work don't really care at all about the company or any profit. Retail employee doesn't care, the store manager doesn't care, the 800 Corporate number doesn't care. The higher the level I go, the more likely I am to get even madder for what should have been a small issue.

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I own and run a technology service business which is developing a very good reputation. Although I don't (can't) do everything on this list, this is more-or-less the formula I follow. I developed it while working as a manager for a variety of businesses:

1. Show them. Employees are less likely to care if their boss doesn't care; taking care of customers starts at the top and works its way down. For a little while I was able to manage a grocery store & restaurant with infamously bad customer service, while the owner was seriously ill. By the time the owner came back, the employees were constantly checking in with customers, straightening shelves, cleaning the store -- all the things they never did before. They did it because I would go out and do it and then ask for their help.

2. Don't be afraid of bad customers. Bad customers hurt employee morale; probably one of the best things I did while managing the restaurant side was walk over to a customer, kneel down to face level with them, and quietly inform them that if they ever spoke to an employee like that again, I'd throw them out. Employees will love the shit out of you if they think you have their back when it counts.

3. Get rid of bad employees. Everybody knows who they are; you don't have to be cruel about it, just let them know that they aren't a good fit and help them decide to move on. Bad employees are cancerous, they bring their friends and their bad attitude spreads.

4. Get good employees. I hire as much for an earnest and polite personality as I do for expertise. The thing is, we can train expertise; in my experience, you can't train good behavior.

5. Take care of your employees. If you can reduce the number of things they have to worry about when they're not at work, then they'll be happier to be at work. Pay them well, get insurance for them (and don't make a big deal of it), make sure there are clear rules in place for the occasional payday advance (and use any such occurrences to re-evaluate whether or not you're paying them well enough), be polite but firm with them, respect them. If they want to go to school and need flexible hours, support that. During the holidays, give them a little bit of paid time off, because the holidays are wickedly stressful for your staff. Don't demean them, ever; don't make them wear idiotic costumes, use stupid code words, sing jingles, or the other bullshit that makes it hard for employees to take a job seriously.

That's about it. It's really not that hard. Most businesses just don't care enough because the attitude at the top is that they can always use marketing to find new customers.

“When one treats people with benevolence, justice, and righteoousness, and reposes confidence in them, the army will be united in mind and all will be happy to serve their leaders'.” ― Sun Tzu

In broad strokes? Select employees carefully. Give them a reason to care about what you do. Mold the company culture such that caring (and related things, like personal authority to effect change) is prioritized over other goods which would get in the way (such as getting the most efficient outcome 100% of the time). Make it obvious to your employees that it matters to them that they fit into that culture, in the way that it matters at some companies that they file the TPS reports on time.

As a customer? Vote with your dollars in favor of businesses which invest in customer service. Most people don't, and the market gives them exactly what they really want.

Quick tip for getting what you want from companies? 1) Buy a share of an index fund. 2) If you have any issue which can't get resolved the traditional way, send a letter on paper to their Investor Relations department. They will leapfrog over all the firewalls put in place to prevent customers from talking with people who have the authority to do anything. (A related trick: mail sent directly to the Vice President of Customer Service, Office of the CEO, etc.)

Adding to your 'as customer' comments, I've had immediate success in person with front line staff by saying "If you do X for me i'll write a very complimentary email to HQ and mention you by name".

You get employees to care by compensating them well for the job they do. This compensation isn't always money. It can be money. It can also be good benefits. It can also be interesting work, but working in retail is inherently non-interesting for most people. So basically when it comes to retail the way to go is to provide good employee compensation and/or benefits. With some notable exceptions (eg. Costco), very few retail employers compensate their employees well, so of course the employees aren't going to care about their jobs.

>"I've been doing a lot of Christmas shopping lately and had to do some returns and stuff"

Give them meaningful work which makes a difference in other people's lives.

It might not be entirely accurate that it's specifically the employees who don't care (though that is also often true), but the company as well. With these kinds of customer-service runarounds, that's often the explicit goal of the company's policies, to stall and exhaust complaints as much as possible. Bored employees are just executing the "stall customer and don't deviate from policy" script that they're required to execute, often with very little leeway to make exceptions even if they truly did want to help you out.

Your employees will never care about the company as much as you do and why should they.. obviously treating employees well goes a way towards getting them to care more, its a two way street, the more you care about an employee, and show it, the more likely they are going to care about the company. Also, larger companies that have high turnover, etc don't exactly inspire warm fuzzy feelings in employees, there isn't some magic formula, you have to realize that people probably aren't as stupid as you take them to be, on average, and you can't trick them into caring, you need to give them a reason to actually want to see the company do well. The more responsibility / talent an employee has the more they feel that they can get another job, if needed, and therefore their fate isn't tied to the fate of the company.

"...what I find is most employees who work don't really care at all about the company or any profit."

Is any of said profit being shared with employees, directly or indirectly?

Look at who you are hiring. If you're hiring people just for their skills to work, you're forgetting that they will bring their own culture (attitudes towards people, company, food, etc). You can't make them forget it without a lot of illegal brainwashing.

It's also the very earliest way to doom your company from within (aside from founders).

This video about what motivates people is really interesting for this topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

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